t's much less daunting once you've put your foot on the road to it. I'm a notorious couch potato and I don't like exercise. Half an hour of physical exercise, like jogging or fast walking a day is a start.

If you look round Hollywood there's no end of white smiles and six packs. Long lines of beautiful people lining up to be incredible on film.

I wanted my dad to be proud of me, and I fell into acting because there wasn't anything else I could do, and in it I found a discipline that I wanted to keep coming back to, that I love and I learn about every day.

I think it's important that you always transform if you can. That's what I was trained to do. You try and hide yourself as much as you can - that's the key to longevity.

A lot of people say I seem masculine, but I don't feel it. I feel intrinsically feminine. I'd love to be one of the boys but I always felt a bit on the outside. Maybe my masculine qualities come from overcompensating because I'm not one of the boys.

Fame and stuff like that is all very cool, but at the end of the day, we're all human beings. Although what I do is incredibly surreal and fun and amazing and I'm really grateful for it, I don't believe my own press release, do you know what I mean?

I think I had only been working nine months when I got Star Trek, and it was huge. It was very overwhelming. So that opened my eyes a bit at an early age, kind of how not be frightened when walking into a responsibility of something like villain in Batman, or a Hobbit, or whatever it is.